Last Friday, Netflix released 13 episodes — a complete season — of its new self-produced political drama House of Cards online at the same time. It was the first step in the company’s innovative media experiment, which obliterates the traditional television distribution model and poses the question: How will people choose to watch a new television show when its content is released en masse rather than parceled out week by week?
In a recent letter to investors, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings asked shareholders to imagine “if books were always released one chapter per week, and were only briefly available to read at 8 p.m. on Thursday. And then someone flipped a switch, suddenly allowing people to enjoy an entire book, all at their own pace. That is the future we are bringing about. That is the future of television. That is the future of Internet TV.”
Putting aside the fact that serialized literature was once a hugely popular format for fiction — and that modern writers like John Scalzi are resurrecting it in the digital sphere — it’s an ambitious and fascinating move that was greeted with mixed reactions from media critics, including Variety‘s Andrew Wallenstein, who dubbed it a “mistake” and declared that “Netflix must rethink binge-viewing.”
So how did the first Netflix-produced original content fare after its season-wide debut?
Karen Barragan, the Head of PR for Original Series at Netflix, told Wired the company was “very happy” about the show’s performance, but declined to release any data about its streaming viewership. “We’ve said from the beginning that this is a different model. I’m glad that we’re not going to jam the old metrics into the new model … because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you watch it over the weekend, if you’re going to watch it over three months.”
But Procera, a network traffic management and tracking company that monitors activity on five out of the top 10 cable ISP providers and three out of the top five DSL providers in North America, released its own analytic snapshot of House of Cards viewership on one broadband network (which they declined to name) during Saturday, when they say binge viewing was most likely to occur.
“Two percent of the subscribers watched the first one, but maybe only .5% made it through to the final one,” Procera’s VP of Global Marketing Cam Cullen told Wired. “Although each episode was not a major factor in overall traffic on this network (especially since the episodes are ~50 minutes long), in aggregate they add up,” he elaborated in his online analysis. “It is clear that the first few episodes were the most heavily watched, but the later episodes got their fair share of action. We even saw one subscriber on a network that consumed 16G of his usage on House of Cards over the weekend.”
Cullen also noted that 11 percent of Netflix viewers watched at least one episode of House of Cards on one network they monitor, and comprised almost 5 percent of overall Netflix bandwidth usage on another.
The 13th and final episode of House of Cards pulled in roughly 28% the viewership of the series premiere in the Procera snapshot of Saturday traffic,
Despite the innovation involved in applying the full-season approach to new content, the (binge) viewing experience shouldn’t feel entirely unfamiliar — at least to anyone who’s watched television shows on Netflix before. After all, the video streaming (and previously, DVD-shipping) service is already how a lot of viewers catch up on entire seasons of TV shows that they’ve missed.
Netflix was how I watched the first three seasons of Lost after I showed up late to the party of that particularly addictive prime-time drama, and seeing it for the first time in a format where I could immediately fast-forward to the next episode was a revelation — and a recipe for binge-watching, particularly on a show where nearly every episode ended in a cliffhanger. A light went on inside the hatch! Next. Holy crap, a smoke monster! Next. No designated broadcast time slots, no waiting.
Of course, Lost was compelling enough that I would have waited the week and tuned in regardless — and did so, during subsequent seasons — but a better question is what sort of impact a full-season release could have for shows that aren’t quite so addictive, especially during the critical moment of their premiere. Speaking from personal experience: a lot.
After watching the mediocre premiere of the new Fox serial killer drama The Following a few weeks ago, a friend asked me if I’d tune in for a second episode. “Probably,” I said. And if I’d had the opportunity to click “Next Episode” the moment that premiere finished, there’s a good chance I would have. But when that second episode showed up on Hulu the next week, my cursor hovered briefly over the icon… and then moved on. It had been just good enough to pique my interest in the moment, but seven days later that middling momentum had been lost.
My reaction to the House of Cards premiere was equally mixed — on the one hand, Kevin Spacey; on the other hand, Kevin Spacey’s Southern accent — and yet somehow I still ended up watching the complete series in one sitting on Friday night, an absurd binge that ended somewhere around 5 AM on Saturday morning. Reflecting on it now, the most remarkable thing is that despite consuming 13 hours of the series, I can’t honestly say that I liked it.
It’s not a great show; it’s debatably a good one, but more relevantly it was just good enough to make me press “Next” every time the episode finished, like a bird pecking at a button that intermittently dispenses food in an operant conditioning experiment. Or perhaps more like Desmond, entering the Numbers over and over inside the digital hatch of Netflix — not sure what would happen if I stopped, and never quite mustering the will to find out when it was so much easier to keep on pushing the button.
Roberto Baldwin contributed to this report.
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Reader Poll: Are You Binge-Watching <em>House of Cards</em>?
